Let the bots battle to their elimination. They won’t help you either!

Editor’s note: This Spend Matters PRO post has been unlocked to continue our exploration of how to get the most value out of your procurement technology and to provide a sample of the depth we go into in our PRO material.

In our piece titled “Have You Mastered the Procurement Basics yet?” we explained how AI won't save you if you haven't covered the basics, because even the best AI needs Big Data (which is likely bigger than you have) to learn from and considerable training to be effective.

Furthermore, while we briefly mentioned Automation, we didn't discuss it in depth, nor did we discuss it outside of AI. Nor did we discuss Robotic Process Automation, or Bots, which various vendors are vigorously vending to the virtuous, who will not gain from their implementation and, in fact, may lose dearly.

This is because, despite all the marketing claims to the contrary, at least today, Bots are nothing more than packaged automation scripts with simple rules and context that can be used to automate basic tasks, tasks that sometimes are less complex than those that can be figured to be handled automatically in more mature platforms.